How to find out where you took a picture
Your digital gallery is a one-way portal to precious moments from the past. Maybe you find a cool picture you forgot about and want to send it to your friends and family. Tap or click here for seven ways to privately share photos.
If you find snapshots from old vacations or road trips, you might think to yourself, “I’d love to go there again.” If you can’t remember where that photo was taken, you might think you’re out of luck. In reality, you might be able to track down that location again.
It all comes down to the technical details embedded into each picture you take. (More on that later.) In this handy guide, we’ll share a few nifty ways that can reveal exactly where your old photos were taken.
Your metadata holds the answers
If you’re not sure what that means, here’s a quick refresher. Every digital photo has data embedded into the image file. We call this metadata. The specific type of metadata we’re covering in this article is EXIF data, which you can find in some TIFF and JPEG images.
Think of EXIF data as an image’s personal ID. You probably carry around some identification, like a driver’s license. It has your name, birthdate and other important facts about yourselves.
Digital images are similar. Many of them carry around their unique information through EXIF files. Open an EXIF file and you can see a ton of information about the image, including GPS coordinates.
Bear in mind that EXIF data won’t be on every image you encounter. You will only be able to spot it if the picture you’re analyzing was taken from a camera with GPS features.
These types of high-tech cameras tag the image with location data, so anyone combing through the EXIF data will find the coordinates. Tap or click here for forensic tools that expose any photo’s hidden data.
You can do this on your phone or computer
If you want to see where you snapped a picture on an Android or iPhone, you’ll have to hope you turned on location tagging at the time of your photoshoot. If so, here is how you can track down a picture’s point of origin.
Listen up, iPhone users
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